Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
I finally found the song I was looking for: it was “Lolita” by Moneyshot off the album Bliss.
Which I CANNOT FIND ANYWHERE ONLINE. Spotify doesn’t have it, iTunes Music doesn’t have it, Musicbrainz doesn’t have it, even Discogs doesn’t have it. CDDB probably has it (given that I’m sure someone submitted it when they ripped the CD back in the day) but they don’t make it easy to search. And FreeDB doesn’t.
But anyway, mystery solved.
Y'all probably know that my views on AI are somewhat nuanced. I’m not 100% “AI BAD!!!” but I’m also hesitant to rely on AI for a lot of things, and generally do not care for generative AI or any situation where you need AI to “reason” on things.
But, recently I’ve wanted to remember the name of a song that I listened to a lot, and where the lyrics I can remember don’t come up in any of the major lyrics databases. I listen to a lot of obscure indie music that tends to get lost by the major platforms, and I’ve been packratting music for decades now.
Further, it’s only fairly recently that music started to get lyrics embedded into the id3 tags (thanks to bandcamp really pushing for that) and even the streaming platforms have taken forever to pick it up. So a lot of the music I listen to has never had its lyrics entered in any sort of machine-searchable way.
But, hey, there are plenty of AI models for vocal extraction and text transcription… so why not actually use them?
I (not so) recently1 finished Echoes of Wisdom and after a ramble about the Zelda games I’ve played and enjoyed, Star implied that I should do a tier list.
So, here we go, way too much effort put into telling the Internet my opinions on things: how I feel about every main series Zelda game so far2.
I’m 47 now.
Or rather, I’ve been 47 for the past two days. I didn’t really want to post about it on my actual birthday, partially because I was super busy that day with two VRChat gigs (following immediately after the previous day’s choir show), but partially because I spent the first half of the day super depressed, particularly over the state of the world, but also over a bunch of interpersonal conflicts I’ve been having which seem to rhyme with one another, and also learning that a good friend of mine is in a really bad situation right now.
And how so many people I feel close to are hurting.
And how of course I share a birthday with a fucking tyrant who was using his birthday as an excuse for a jingoistic military parade, and how completely reasonable it would be that most of my friends would be out protesting that, rather than coming to see me perform silly songs about mental health in VRChat.
I’m simultaneously doing great and not-great.
I only just learned from eladnarra’s blog that May is ME/CFS awareness month, which I guess is fitting given that throughout all of May I’ve been getting painfully aware that I may have been developing it on top of everything else.
Basically, ever since I got COVID last June I’ve been especially prone to fatigue, vertigo, brain fog, shortness of breath, a persistent cough, and a whole bunch of other long COVID signs. The worst of it comes and goes, but this month has been particularly bad, especially on the fatigue front. And ME/CFS is a very common part of long COVID.
Hey y'all, the Furality dealer’s den is open early this year, and this year it’s also free to the public. It’s a pretty incredible world and I’m glad to be a part of it!
If you visit the dealer’s den a all, please be sure to come by booth 816 at some point. During the show itself (June 5-8) there’s a chance you might find a certain critter playing piano nearby, as well.
I got very little done this week and I’m feeling pretty bad about it.
Some comments have happened on certain other sites from my last post about the Comma. Most of them are in the form of, “This person is insane/irresponsible/reckless for doing this.”
Some points:
Choose kindness and charity.
Wellp, my whack-a-mole approach finally got to be too much to maintain. The last day or so my server has been absolutely inundated with traffic from thousands of IP blocks, all coming from China, and I got sick of trying to keep up with it myself.
I looked into setting up Anubis and preparing to just whitelist a lot of IndieWeb things, but it’s all just so very overwhelming and for now I’ve gone with Cloudflare, problematic as they are, because the amount of energy I can put into this shrinks every day and sometimes I just want things to stop sucking for a while.
All of my DNS has propagated but of course it’ll be a while before the bots decide to update their own DNS caches, so my server is still getting absolutely hammered, but hopefully things will subside, and in the meantime things are at least responsive.
I guess at some point I’ll have to figure out how to actually set up TLS with Cloudflare (since I’ve been using Letsencrypt wildcard certs but obviously those don’t work anymore when Cloudflare is handling my DNS) but that’s a problem for future me. Also I’ll definitely be on the lookout to make sure that Cloudflare is properly honoring my login cookies. It’d definitely be unfortunate if it gets confused about logins, which is one of the more common failure modes with HTTP proxies.
I’m also super worried that this will interfere with IndieWeb stuff, because of course most of the anti-bot things assume that any traffic coming from data centers or from headless/scriptless user agents is abusive. Which is, y'know, 99.99% accurate, but that 0.01% is stuff I really care about (namely interop).
Anyway. I resent that this is the state of the Internet right now. It’s getting really difficult for me to find anything positive about AI when this is how the industry treats everyone.
